What are your thoughts about the MEAP market? How do you differentiate?
The MEAP market is crowded, with vendors and organizations alike trying to make sense of the complex world of enterprise mobility. Kony is able to differentiate itself from the competition on a variety of ways:
• Offering a multi-channel approach to application development, giving companies the ability to provide a consistent user experience optimized for the device using a single code base
• Giving customers a Service Level Agreement (SLA) to support new versions of existing platforms as well as new devices, thus future proofing mobile investments
• Enabling a backward compatible approach, which allows for applications to be fully functional and take advantage of new OS features as they are offered
• Offering a suite of pre-built, fully customizable and extensible B2C and B2E apps, thus enabling quick time-to-market
• Comprehensive enterprise mobility management solution, which gives companies the confidence and control to quickly deploy apps across devices and platforms
Kony also has over over 250 deployed and live customers in 38 countries.
Who is your target market? Size companies?
Kony’s target market is any enterprise looking to build a strategic multi-channel vision to engage its customers and employees with applications across any digital channel, whether it is through mobile, tablet, desktop or beyond. Kony is targeting the Global 5,000 in a variety of vertical industries discussed later in this document. Based on our web traffic, lead responses, sales activity, partner activity conference participation, and PR metrics, we believe that we have had interactions with about 40% of the Global 5,000 target market. We have also gathered some public as well as internal data to show that based on competitive deals in 2012, Kony captured about 25% of the enterprise platform market for licenses and direct vendor services.
Over the next three years, we will reach a wider customer base as we take all of our products to the cloud and offer an end to end experience to design, develop, test, deploy and manage multi-channel apps all in the cloud. Additionally we will also deploy a number of SaaS based apps that will appeal to large and medium size enterprises for both B2E and B2C, expanding our reach into the F5000 and additional vertical markets beyond our core markets today. As mobile apps continue to penetrate all aspects of business and consumer life, our cloud and SaaS strategy will give us the ability to sell more departmental solutions and target our offerings at the CIO and VP level, but also at the enterprise developer and stand alone app development organizations. Customers will be able to purchase these apps through direct sales, inside sales and via an expanding partner and SI channel.
Who in a client company typically buys your product?
The mobile decision maker within the organization that purchases Kony is typically from the CIO office. Specific titles include Senior Solutions Architect, VP, IT.
Is it a SaaS platform or does it require a server infrastructure at the client?
Kony can be deployed on-premise, hosted or as a SaaS offering. Kony can be deployed on the cloud, on-premise or as a hosted model. Kony cloud enables application developers to deploy their applications to a cloud environment provided by Kony that includes Kony Server, Kony App Store, Kony Sync and Kony Enterprise Mobility Management. The application developers can focus on development and only pay for what they use. In addition to the deploying to the Kony Cloud, the industry standards based approach of the Kony Platform enables the use of partner cloud offerings as well.
The Kony Platform has been successfully deployed to IBM Cloud (PureSystems), Oracle Cloud, HP Cloud and Amazon AWS. Typically, Kony clients adopt a fully, multi-tenant deployment model where any app is deployed on any instance. Apps can be deployed on as many instances as required. Multiple apps may be deployed in a single instance within the capacity of a single instance as well. In certain scenarios, client environments can scale to as many instances as required by adding more hardware. No dedicated hardware is required to any customer or app.
The deployment of a multi-channel application is executed in two main parts. The web application components, data sync services, and back-end service integrations are deployed as standard Java EE components to any enterprise grade Java EE application server. The Kony Platform is not restricted to a single Java EE application server so the customer has maximum deployment flexibility. This part of the deployment can be executed directly from the Kony Studio or by using standard Java EE deployment scripts and automation tools. The second part of the deployment process is for the native application binaries compiled by the Kony Platform. These binaries can be directly deployed into the Kony Enterprise App store for testing or end-users or to the various platform specific consumer app stores. In addition to deploying the application, the server side of the application can also be deployed to the Kony cloud environment with one click deployment from the Kony Studio.
What kind of vertical markets are you seeing success in?
Kony develops for a variety of vertical markets. We serve companies in the following industries: automotive, financial, healthcare & life sciences, industrial manufacturing, oil & gas, retail, service sector, travel and utilities.
Kony’s customers include more than 70 Fortune 500 companies, the largest global bank, and global brands such as Toyota, Capital One, Hyatt, and Huntington National Bank. Our customers have been able to generate hundreds of millions of dollars through apps that perform a number of consumer and business functions, including mobile travel reservations and ticketing, mobile banking remote deposit and mobile insurance claims processing.
What types of apps are customers developing with your platform?
Kony offers prebuilt B2C and B2E applications. On the B2C front, Kony has pre-built applications for Retail Banking, Retail, Insurance, Healthcare Payer, Private Banking and Commercial Banking. On the B2E front, applications include CRM, Field Services, HR, Inventory Management, Enterprise Asset Management, Utilities, etc. Through the flexibility of the Kony Platform, the applications are configurable, allowing customization for specific features and branding as well as extensible to support specific business requirements.
Does your platform rely on HTML5 only? How would a client use it if they want to customize the app after its been developed in your platform?
Kony develops across multiple deployment modes, including HTML5 and mobile web, hybrid, native and mixed-mode. This depends on the customers needs.
The Kony platform allows you to design, develop, test, deploy and manage applications for any development method. Whether it is native, HTML5, hybrid or mixed-mode. HTML5 is fully integrated with Kony’s development and deployment system. We have full HTML5 capabilities with all the expectations of the enterprise. With the same openstandards JavaScript code base in developing the HTML5 output, you also get mobile web in a device specific deployment determined by our device specific database rendering capabilities. This allows you to reach 98 percent of the devices in the market: smartphones, feature phones, tablets and traditional desktop web.
Kony handles the variances to support HTML5 across all browsers. Kony offers the world’s best tools for developing great, enterprise-grade applications for HTML5 and native technologies:
• Graphical screen layout tools
• HTML5 porting tools from native and mobile web apps
• HTML5, mobile web, and native debugging tools
• Graphical service integration configuration
• Service simulation tools
• Profiling tools
• Dynamic skins and themes
• Support for essentially any phone, tablet or browser
Do you sell only to enterprises or to app developers as well?
Kony sells to enterprises both through a direct sales force and through partners and SIs.
Kony doesn’t sell to app developers directly today, but rather features a developer portal to enable a global community of developers to build and support multi-channel applications.
Do you view app dev companies as competitors or potential partners?
Kony partners with individual developers and enterprise developer teams to grow a global community to build multi-channel applications on the Kony Platform. The Kony Developer Portal is a one-stop destination for access to the Kony Technology.
Can I get an idea on the price points of your product? What is the starting price and what is the range?
Kony’s pricing model allows our customers to build for mobile, tablet and desktop channels with no limitations on number of apps or channels. We offer separate pricing for consumer (sessions) and enterprise use cases (named users). Kony’s graphical-layout based IDE, various enterprise connectors, our SKY technology and support is included in a simple price point, as compared to our competitors who break down the purchase into multiple line items. We will be releasing a public pricing model with the launch of our cloud offerings.
A big thanks to Kony and for more information on their solution: Kony.com
